Category: writing

With less than a thousand word to go to “win” the NaNoWriMo event, I figured I’d throw in an afternoon session to push myself past the milestone.  I wrote one new scene that added 1,109 words–which gives me a 20-day total of 50,159 words, and which officially pushes me over the 50,000 word-mark.  For the second year in a row, I am a NaNoWriMo winner.  Here is a picture of the winner in his brand new NaNoWriMo winner’s t-shirt:

And here’s a closeup of the shirt:

And here is how my win looked in Scrivener:

It’s pretty exciting to win the challenge in a mere 20 days.  But this is only the first step in my larger goal–which is to write a novel that is good enough to SELL. And that means the next milestone will take over as my focus: to finish the novel.  I completed NaNoWriMo last year on November 25 and I ended up with 60,000 words by November 30.  But I gave up after that, feeling that it was a good exercise, but what I had written wouldn’t work for a novel.  This year, I’ve tried to plan things better and at the 50,000-word mark, I’m feeling very good about the story that I’m telling.

My plan going forward is to maintain the same pace that I’ve been working since I started: aiming for 2,000 words each and every day until I hit 90,000 words (or finish the novel). At my current pace I should finish up the first draft around December 10.  I will continue to make my daily posts of my progress so that those who are interested can continue to follow along on this process.

All told, I wrote 3,617 words today, which is an extraordinary day for me.  I’m planning to be back up early tomorrow to get in my 2,000 words.  Very early for a Sunday since we’re hitting the road at 8am.  But I’m taking the rest of the evening off.

Here are the revised stats for today:

I managed a rather unexpected 2,508 words this morning in a mere 90 minutes, which surprised me, but which I think is due in part to a mid-course correction I made yesterday, which I will discuss in due course below.  This morning’s session brought me to a 20-day total of 49,050 words.  When I wrapped up this morning and saw that I was within 950 words of “winning”, I was tempted to press on, but I held back, deciding that I had a good session and didn’t want to press my luck.  There’s always this afternoon.

After yesterday morning’s session, I really felt that my Part 2 outline was not nearly in the shape it needed to be for me to continue without a constant daily struggle.  So I decided to address that by fleshing out all of the issues during my lunch hour yesterday.  Part 2 is more complex than Part 1, but that doesn’t mean it needed to be structured in a more complex way.  Part of my goal was to see if I could find some kind of simpler structure–like I have in Part 1–that would work in Part 2.  So I cleaned off the large whiteboard in my office and began to map out what happens in Part 2.  I tried identifying all of the key plot points, and how those points added tension to the plot, what characters were involved, when in the timeline they took place, and what forces were acting against them.  The result was the following:

It might be hard read (which is good, I suppose, since it doesn’t give anything away), but the diagram I ended up with listed all of the events on the timeline, and in relationship to a barely visible narrative arc line that curves its way up through the center of the diagram. The items in black are major plot points and the red lines that seem to criss-cross between them are items of tension, things that push against the plot point to add tension to the storyline.  I started with a simple, “How do I get from A to B in an exciting way?” and worked from there.  It turned out to be very helpful.  And John, my next door office neighbor pointed out that what I had done was have positive plot points one side and opposite plot points on the other.  It was completely unintentional, but it gave me the simple framework that I was looking for and that I’d already achieved in Part 1.

It made filling in the rest of the outline for Part 2 much easier.  But it also means there is a fair amount of reworking that will be required in the first 5 chapters of Part 2.  I say “will be required” because I’m not going back to rework them now.  NaNoWriMo is not about rewriting, but  have the outline marked up in such a way as to identify what needs reworking so I can attend to that in the second draft.  Meanwhile, I think the results of this “mid-course correction” were apparent in my work this morning.  I wrote Chapters 21 and 22 and managed to get through 2,500 words in the space of 90 minutes.  A pretty remarkable pace for me.

The reworking isn’t quite complete yet and I expect I will spend some time this afternoon (thus, the “morning session”) fixing up what remains to be fixed (without deleting or rewriting) and at that point, I may try and squeeze in one more scene to push me over the 50,000 word mark.  I received my winner’s T-shirt yesterday and as soon as I pass that mark, I’ll post a photo of me wearing that shirt.

Here are my stats for today:

I was just not well prepared this morning and I think it kind of showed.  I went to bed fairly early last night, but earlier I had been trying to work out some problems in Part 2 of the story.  I’d sketched out where the part started and where it would end and tried to figure out how to get from start to finish while keeping the reader interested in what was going on.  It made me rethink of some of the chapters I’d outlined, but I didn’t have time to actually make changes to the outline.

I woke up at 4:30, bleary-eyed and still feeling slightly under the weather.  Originally, it was my intention to write the scene that I didn’t get written yesterday. But this morning that scene didn’t feel right at this point in the story.  And I hadn’t outlined in any great detail any of the chapters beyond that scene yet, all I had was a paragraph of two on each  So I literally sat in front of my laptop for fifteen minutes, staring at a blank screen, uncertain what to write.  It’s the first time that’s happened to me this NaNoWriMo.  I finally decided to jump slightly ahead in the story to get things moving and that’s what I went with.  I ended up writing two scenes, neither of which are great, but I got them down on paper as markers.  The writing started out slowly but I picked up some steam as I went along.  I managed to write 2,203 words, barely continuing my 19-day streak of besting my personal goal for each day.  It brought my 19-day word count to 46,542 words.

Since I am aiming for a 90.000 word first draft, today officially puts me at more than halfway done.  I have less novel to write than I have already written.  This is a good feeling because it means that I know I can achieve what’s left to be written.  I’ve already written 46,000 words and I know what it’s like to do that. All I need to do now is keep plugging along.  At this rate, I should finish up in another 18 or 19 days, which assuming the latter, puts me at December 8 for a complete first draft.

One thing is clear.  My outline for Part 2 needs some serious fleshing out for the ten chapters that remain.  I’ll need to work on that today so I don’t run into the same kind of problems tomorrow.  In the meantime, I feel like I need to do some kind of little celebration, rewarding myself for what I’ve managed to get done so far.  I’ve written half a novel!  Yay me!

Here are today’s stats:

Today is the 3/5ths mark for NaNoWriMo.  Participants keeping pace should hit 30,000 words today.  I pounded out 2,355 words this morning, bringing my 18-day total to 44,519 words.  That is about the 9/10ths mark, and indeed, I’m now about 14,000 words a head of pace, or more than 8 days.  It is a good feeling, and if I can hit my average on Friday and Saturday, then I will pass the 50,000 word mark on Saturday morning, November 21.

The first half of the morning was a struggle for me.  I had a long work day yesterday, followed by a meeting of the Arlington Writers Group which is always fun.  But I was starting to feel sick the night before, and last night before bed, I had a sore, scratchy throat.  I virtually passed out when my head it the pillow and didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at 5am–which is unusual.  Kelly suggested taking a break today if I was sick, but I was feeling okay and I wasn’t going to let a sore throat get in the way.  I headed downstairs to get started on Chapter 19.  My plan for the chapter had been two scenes, but as it turned out, only one of them got written this morning.

The scene in question started out slow and for the first half of the writing session, I had more or less resigned myself to under a thousand words for today.  It’s okay, I told myself, I’m slightly under the weather, and besides, I’m so far ahead I can take a breather.  The big thing was getting up and making the effort this morning.  And no sooner had that thought crossed my mind, when I saw a twist to the scene I was writing that would be a fascinating one to explore, one which would add to the drama of the story line without breaking the spine of the plot.  So I headed down that twisted pathway and I ended up wrapping up the scene with over 2,300 words.  The big question now is where to fit in the second scene that was supposed to be part of this chapter.  I could still include it.  It was going to be a shorter scene, anyway, and has a twist in it that ties back to an earlier chapter (16, I think–I don’t have it in front of me).  I still haven’t decided.

My outline for part 2 was fleshed out in detail through chapter 19.  The remaining chapters in the outline are just brief paragraphs and so at some point today, I’m hoping to expand those to the level of detail that’s worked for me so far through this process, and carry them through the end of Part 2.  And there’s a small chance that I will write that extra scene at lunch today so that I can begin fresh on Chapter 20 tomorrow morning.

My confidence is high on “winning” NaNoWriMo.  So much so that yesterday, I purchased the 2010 NaNoWriMo winner’s t-shirt from the online store.  My confidence is growing on my ability to complete the first draft of the novel by mid-December.  The biggest hurdle coming up for me is to continue pressing forward without NaNoWriMo’s daily milestone looming over me.

Here are the stats for today:

I had the most fun this morning that I’ve had so far working on the novel.  My goal was to write Chapter 18, which I’d outlined as a fun chapter to write, and that turned out to be the case.  In fact, despite starting promptly at 5am, I couldn’t bring myself to stop and it was only after I’d gotten down a remarkable 2,809 words did I bring the chapter to a close and finally push away from my desk as the clock struck 7am.  It brings my 17-day total to 41,164 words which is incredible even by my standards.  I feel like I am “in the zone”, pitching a no-hitter through the middle innings.  And like a no hitter, there’s a chance that I lose my cool and things will fall apart, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

This morning’s chapter led up to the first sex scene in the book, and before my friends begin salivating, let me say that it is what I would call a very “Asimovian” sex scene: the act takes place off stage and is absolutely necessary for the plot.  But it was a lot of fun writing the flirting and banter that leads up to it.  In my outline, I had worked things out slightly differently (the scene involved a call girl) but as the scene progressed, I realized that no call girl was necessary and the two characters who met for the first time at the beginning of the chapter had enough chemistry for what I needed to take place at the end of the chapter.  And it adds an additional plot complication, which is always nice to have.

I’m still on track to hit 50,000 words on Sunday, but I’m confident about making that now and it is no longer my focus.  My focus now is entirely on that 90,000 word mark, and being able to say by mid-December that I once wrote the entire first draft of a novel.  Maybe nothing will come of it, but I’m beginning to feel very good about where this is going.

Here are the (remarkable) stats for today:

This was the toughest morning so far.  I wasn’t enthusiastic about writing Chapter 17 which probably meant that I needed to reconsider it on the outline. When I got downstairs, I had virtually decide to skip the chapter for the day and write the more exciting Chapter 18. But I found myself coming back to what I had outlined for Chapter 17 and decided to give it a shot, altering it as I went along to fit my mood.  I turned out 2 scenes, the first of which gave some good background on one of the antagonists of the story, and did so in a way that makes her actions seem much more reasonable.  Or so I hope.  The second scene evolved into something even more special.  It’s a shorter scene but it sets up some nice stuff a few chapters down the line.

I got off to a slow start and had gotten through only 1000 words after the first hour.  Nevertheless, I pressed on and I ended the session with my 16th consecutive day beating my personal goal.  I wrote 2,247 words bringing my 16-day total to 39,355 words and putting me nearly 13,000 words ahead of pace. That’s outstanding considering that at one point early in session I was worried I might not even break 1000 words.

Tomorrow should be better, but I’l take today as a success as well.  Last year, while I successfully competed NaNoWriMo, the beginning of the third week was where my regular schedule broke down.  I stopped getting up early, started skipping days, and scattering my sessions at lunch or in the evenings.  That hasn’t happened here.  Two days into the third week and I’ve been up before 5am both days.  And that has every sign of continuing through mid-December.

Here are the stats for today:

Today marks the official halfway point for NaNoWriMo.  The challenges lasts for the month of November and November 15 is halfway through the month. Ideally, if you are keeping to pace, you should be at about 25,000 words by the end of the day today.  For the 15th consecutive day I have exceeded both the NaNoWriMo suggested pace and my own target.  I wrote Chapter 16 this morning, the first chapter in Part 2 of the novel.  I got through 2,327 words in just an hour and a half, which is pretty remarkable for me.  It brings my 15-day total to 37,107 words, more than 12,000 word ahead of NaNoWriMo pace.

This morning’s chapter laid out some of the problems and challenges that will plague the characters over the course of the next 2 years–which is the duration of time covered by Part 2 of the novel  There is an interesting progression here that I didn’t really notice until this morning.  Part 1 covers a period of time of roughly 2 weeks; part 2 a period of roughly 2 years; and Part 3 covers a period of about 2 decades.  It will be interesting to see how this unfolds stylistically. There is a lot more going on in Part 2 than Part 1, but I’m trying to weave these things together in an interesting way.  I’ve got Chapters 16-19 outlined in detail and I hope to fill in the detail on Chapters 20-30 this evening.  Than it is just a matter of hitting about a chapter a day for the next 14 days.

At this point, it’s looking like I’ll hit 50,000 words on the morning of November 20, which is this coming Sunday.  That’s perfect, really, since I’ll be heading up to New York later that morning to attend a SFWA event on Monday.  I’m hoping to still get my writing in on Sunday and Monday, if only to keep my forward momentum.  But if I don’t I’m not going to stress over it.

I’m on pace to finish up the month of November at somewhere around 74,000 words.  That leaves only about 16,000 words to finish up in December and at this point, it is looking more and more like I will have a completed first draft by December 7 or so.  I’m beginning to worry about Part 3 just a little because of the time span it covers, and how to convey this timespan in the course of the narrative, but I’m still working on ideas and I have a few which might work.  In the meantime, I’m trying to keep my focus on the task at hand, and I’m fairly pleased with what I got down this morning.

Here are the stats for today, the official halfway point:

When I wrote my outline for Far Away Places, I had a rough I idea that the story would be told in three parts.  Since I was aiming for 90,000 words, I assumed that each part would represent a third of the novel, or about 30,000 words and I outlined accordingly.  This morning I finished Part 1 of the novel.  For the 14th day in a row, I not only exceeded the NaNoWriMo pace of 1667 words/day, I exceeded my own pace of 2000 words/day, finishing the session with 2318 words.  It brought my 14-day total to 34,780 words.  Considering I was aiming for about 30,000 words in Part 1, this is pretty darn good, I think.  I had originally outlined 15 chapters.  I ended up with 14 chapters because I consolidated two of the shorter chapters into a single one.  Part 1 ended on a positive note, which is what I was looking for, but the ending needs some work–and I’ve made some notes for when I return to it in the second draft.

Tomorrow, I’ll begin Part 2.  This enters the long middle of the novel and it is here, as I understand it, that many would-be novelists get bogged down.  I am hoping to avoid this, but only time will tell.  If all goes well, I’ll be wrapping up Part 2 in about 2 week from now, adding another 30,000 words to what I’ve already got.  Over the past few days, I’ve been fleshing out the outline for Part 2 making changes to my original based on things that have happened in Part 1 that I didn’t plan for.  There were three main subplots in Part 1.  These will grew into 6 subplots in Part 2 and I hope this will keep things interesting for me as a writing and for any future reader.  The outline still requires some work and I hope to get to that later today.

I’m very pleased with my progress thus far.  I am more than 11,000 words ahead of NaNoWriMo pace–that’s nearly a week ahead of schedule.  More importantly, I’m pleased with the writing overall.  The prose can be dramatically improved in the second draft, but the story is compelling, I think, and it is hanging together well through the first third of the novel.  I hope it will continue to do so through the daunting two-thirds that remain.

Here are the stats for today:

I was up at 6:30 this morning as opposed to 7, thanks to going to bed just after 8 last night and getting a full night’s sleep.  I wrote chapter 13 this morning, which consisted of the first three scenes after the climactic Chapter 12.  I got in a total of 2,199 words (would have been nice to squeeze in one more I suppose) for a 13-day total of 32,462 words.

I think I’m more than 11,000 words above NaNoWriMo pace which is a comfortable feeling, but I also have yet to encounter a day where I can’t exceed my own personal daily goal of 2000 words.  I’m sure that day is coming, but it’s nice to know that at this point, I’ve more than made up for it.  At my current pace, I can cut down to just over 1000 words a day and still hit 50,000 words by November 30.  But of course, I’m aiming for 90,000 words by December 15 and I’m going to keep plugging away, and keep the pressure on my NaNo buddies.

Here are the stats for today:

I finished up Chapter 12 at lunch today, adding another 1500 words and bringing my daily total to 3,862 words, which is my best day so far this year.  The extra session brought me past the 30,000 word mark so that my 12-day total now stands at 30,076 words–an average of just over 2,500 words/day.

Chapter 12 really grew into a good climactic action sequence that shifts rapidly back and forth between two main viewpoints in what I think is a very entertaining way.  In second draft, I think it will be an even stronger chapter because the implications and what is at stake will have more meaning as I back-fill from notes I’ve taken along the way.  As it stands, there are 11 short scenes in the chapter that alternate viewpoints throughout an fairly complicated action sequence and that alone was fun to write.

And while I was completing the chapter an implication emerged that forms the basis of a major subplot for the second novel in the series (assuming the first one is successful, and my definition of successful = published).  When I originally outlined this, I did so in the context of a trilogy, with a detailed outline for the work in progress and a loose plot summary for a second and third follow on story, the overall story arc leading up to an event that is revealing in the third book.  Today, the catalyst for the second book emerged and it is wicked-cool (as I used to say when I lived in New England).

I’m feeling pretty good today with how things are going.  That’s not to say that what I’ve written in perfect by any means.  A substantial amount of rewriting will be required, but I think I have a strong, complex story with strong, complex characters and the whole concept of a novel is starting to gel in my brain.

Here are the revised stats for today:

Whenever I hit a day where I don’t do quite as good as the previous day, I feel like I’ve missed my mark, and perhaps this is one of the downsides of NaNoWriMo.  In focusing on quantity, a good days writing session, well above your target, still fells like a failure if you didn’t do as good as the day before.  This morning, I jumped into Chapter 12 and managed to get through 2,317 words before I ran out of time–with the chapter unfinished.  2,317 words is 317 words above my daily target and some 650 words above the NaNo suggested target.  A very good day by any measure, and yet it was some 200 words short of yesterday.

Chapter 12 is the climactic chapter of Part 1 of the novel.  Two plots finally come together, told through two different view points, and in this chapter, I did something a little difference.  To pick up the pace, the chapter, as it presently stands, is broken into 8 scenes that shift back and forth between the two viewpoints in a kind of jump-cut fashion.  One viewpoint leaves off at a semi-cliffhanger, and the other picks up at that cliffhanger from a different viewpoint.  Fun to write, but it slowed me down a little, and in fact, I couldn’t finish.  I ran out of time with about 2 scenes left to complete. It is for that reason that I titled this entry “morning session”.  I’m thinking I’ll come back to it at lunchtime today and finish it off.

Chapters 13 and 14 are on the downhill side, wrapping up the loose ends and emphasizing those threads and subplots that will play an important role in Parts 2 and 3 of the story line.  The threads that run through the story are the complicated part, and trying to keep the tension high makes it even more difficult.  To illustrate what I’ve been trying to do, without giving too much away, I’ve put together the following diagram which describes the narrative arc of Part 1 of the novel.  (Click on the image for a larger version.)

The thick, red line represents the narrative arc over the course of the 14 chapters in Part 1.  The higher the line goes, the more of an increase in tension until things come to a head in Chapter 12, which is what I was working on this morning.  The color coding of the chapter lines represent the major viewpoint character of the chapter and a dashed line represents multiple viewpoints.  Underneath the arch are three lines that roughly illustrate the narrative arch for the three major subplots that unfold in part 1 of the novel.  This is what I am trying to achieve–I think.  Whether or not I’m successful at it is something that I’ll worry about in January when I begin the editing process.

If I do finish up Chapter 12 at lunch today, you can expect a second, “afternoon session” post later on today.

Here are today’s stats: